Max Kabilafkas
Apprentice elf
- Joined
- Dec 19, 2020
- Messages
- 55
I'm having some troubles with the power injection for my mini trees.
I have 8 mini trees which are broken into two lots of four. Each mini tree plus star uses 200 5v pixels (4 x 50 node strings). The wire diagram below shows how I have them wired up (I have only showed one group of four trees for clarity.
I have power injection at the junction between each string of pixels, with the very first string of Mini Tree 1 being the only one powered by the controller. In order to save cable length I built some homemade power busses to split the power injection wires up at each mini tree.
The power supply performing the power injection has a 300W capacity. According to this calculator - https://www.da-share.com/calculators/led-strip-string-current/ - the 750 pixels that are connected to that power supply should draw 208W of power at 100% brightness. I have the pixels set to 30% brightness which should be 63W, well below the 300W capacity of the power supply

Homemade Power Bus 1 looks like this -

And Homemade Power Bus 2, 3 and 4 look like this -

All wiring used throughout the whole circuit is 18AWG.
I can see that there is a power injection issue as (aside from the very first string of lights which is power via the controller), when I get the lights to shine a white colour, they get progressively redder the further away from the controller the strings are.
I'm guessing that the issue is something to do with my power busses, but I am not sure why. I thought that the way I have wired it all up basically means that all the wires are all melded together, effectively making all the power injection points operate in parallel.
Alternatively maybe as the length of power cable needed to reach each mini tree gets longer, the resistance increases, resulting in less current able to reach the trees?
Any help would be much appreciated
Thanks
Max
I have 8 mini trees which are broken into two lots of four. Each mini tree plus star uses 200 5v pixels (4 x 50 node strings). The wire diagram below shows how I have them wired up (I have only showed one group of four trees for clarity.
I have power injection at the junction between each string of pixels, with the very first string of Mini Tree 1 being the only one powered by the controller. In order to save cable length I built some homemade power busses to split the power injection wires up at each mini tree.
The power supply performing the power injection has a 300W capacity. According to this calculator - https://www.da-share.com/calculators/led-strip-string-current/ - the 750 pixels that are connected to that power supply should draw 208W of power at 100% brightness. I have the pixels set to 30% brightness which should be 63W, well below the 300W capacity of the power supply

Homemade Power Bus 1 looks like this -

And Homemade Power Bus 2, 3 and 4 look like this -

All wiring used throughout the whole circuit is 18AWG.
I can see that there is a power injection issue as (aside from the very first string of lights which is power via the controller), when I get the lights to shine a white colour, they get progressively redder the further away from the controller the strings are.
I'm guessing that the issue is something to do with my power busses, but I am not sure why. I thought that the way I have wired it all up basically means that all the wires are all melded together, effectively making all the power injection points operate in parallel.
Alternatively maybe as the length of power cable needed to reach each mini tree gets longer, the resistance increases, resulting in less current able to reach the trees?
Any help would be much appreciated
Thanks
Max
Attachments
Last edited: